THE TRAGEDY
OF THE
ASSYRIANS
BY
LT. COL. R. S. STAFFORD
D.S.O., M. C.
Published 1935 A.D.
Assyrian International News Agency
Books Online
www.aina.org
TO MY WIFE
WHO
REMAINED IN MOSUL, DURING AUGUST 1933
"HISTORY, WHICH IS INDEED LITTLE MORE THAN
THE REGISTER OF THE CRIMES, FOLLIES, AND
MISFORTUNES OF MANKIND." GIBBON,
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAPTER II
PREFACE
In August and September 1933 reports of events which had been taking place in northern Iraq occupied some space in the columns of the daily press, not only of Great Britain, but of Europe. For some years previously comparatively little attention had been paid by the British press to the affairs of Iraq. The termination of the British mandate in October 1932 and the consequent complete independence of Iraq had been welcomed in England with much satisfaction; indeed, practically the whole British press had long advocated the curtailment of British responsibilities and expenditure in that country. Sincere good wishes for the success of the new Iraqi state were universally expressed. In the summer of 1933, King Feisal, to whom more than to anyone else Iraq owed the fulfillment of her national aspirations, paid a state visit to England, where his charm of manner and attractive personality made a deep impression on all who met him. As a result of this visit hopes for the continuance of close and friendly relations between the two countries were strengthened
Up to the summer of 1933 comparatively few people in England were aware of the existence of the Assyrians in Iraq. Ecclesiastical circles had, indeed, been interested in this Christian remnant, and there were others who had expressed concern regarding this minority in the north of Moslem Iraq. The reports of the massacres of Christians by Moslems came as a shock to everyone, and not least to those who had at heart the future of Iraq. These reports alleged that large numbers of Assyrians had been murdered. None of the accounts given were accurate, either as to the details of the massacres or as to the causes which had brought them about. In Iraq a veil of secrecy was successfully imposed, and the news that trickled through became more and more scanty, and more and more inaccurate. On September 5, 1933, King Feisal died very suddenly in Switzerland, and this sad event, though it once more brought Iraq temporarily into the news, rather helped to submerge the Assyrian question. Since then, so many more important events have occurred throughout the world that very occasional references to it have appeared in the press, and the question has been forgotten by all but the small section of people who are really interested.
Even these people, however, are by no means fully informed of what actually happened. The inevitable result, in the absence of any authoritative statement, has been the circulation - often by means of pamphlets - of all manner of garbled accounts. These accounts have been equally unfair to Great Britain, to Iraq, and to the Assyrians. It appears only right that a true account should be given of what really happened, and why it happened. This is the object of this book. A no less important object is to show that the future of the Assyrians is still unsettled. Something must be done for this unfortunate people. They have suffered much, and if some of their sufferings have been the result of their own folly, allowance should be made for the circumstances in which they found themselves. People who feel they are unwanted are not likely to make easy or pleasant guests.
My duties as Administrative Inspector in Iraq, where I had been for six years, brought me to Mosul in May 1933. I was thus in the closest touch with the Assyrian situation as it developed that summer, and I was in a unique position to know what really took place. I have endeavoured to write as impartial an account as possible. If I have been compelled on occasions to criticize the conduct of the Assyrians, I hope that it will be realized that I am far from lacking in sympathy towards them. If I have written strongly of the behaviour of a section of the Iraqi army, let it not be thought that I have done so in any spirit of ill will towards Iraq. On the contrary, than myself there is no more sincere well-wisher of that country, and this, I venture to hope, will be understood by my many Iraqi friends.
Just north-east of the present-day boundary of Iraq and within the borders of Turkey, there is situated a tangled mass of mountains, generally known as Hakkiari. These mountains resemble those of Switzerland, but the country is on an even grander scale. The valleys are narrower; many of them, indeed, are precipitous gorges falling thousands of feet from the high mountains above and bearing little vegetation except a strip of green along the torrent at the base. The mountains rise to 12,000 and even to 14,000 feet. In the summer snow lies on the highest peaks and in winter even in the lowest valleys the snow is deep. The scenery is magnificent, particularly where the Greater Zab River bursts its way through the mountain mass in a series of deep and narrow gorges with falls and rapids as the river drops. Great forests of oak, juniper and, more rarely, pine and maple cover the mountain-sides. In the valleys there is a profusion of rhododendrons, arbutus, hawthorn, and other small trees and shrubs. During the short spring, which follows the melting of the snows, the ground is carpeted with every kind of Alpine flower. The fauna is of the usual Caucasian type - wolves, bears, hyenas, ibex, martens, and foxes. The bird life ranges from tiny pipits and larks to the eagles and vultures that inhabit the higher crags. Chikor abound to attract the sportsman, and there is excellent fishing to be had. This land, where only a virile people could hope to survive, has seldom been visited by Europeans and not at all since the outbreak of the Great War. It is now practically empty, but before the war, tribes of mountaineers could find a scant living by sowing crops on the terraced valleys and by pasturing their hardy sheep and goats on the mountain sides.
Roads, of course, there were none, and the rough tracks which connected one valley with the next were impassable even for mules for several months in the year.
Such a country could afford only a meagre livelihood to the tribes who lived there. These tribes before the war were largely composed of Assyrians, and with them this narrative will be mainly concerned.
They had as neighbours Kurdish tribes as savage and as uncivilized as themselves, while to the north in the direction of the Van, the Armenian settlements began, people who, if less warlike were perhaps a little more versed in the arts of business and agriculture. To the East runs the Persian-Turkish frontier, a series of high and desolate peaks culminating in Mount Ararat, some seventy miles to the north. To the west, also in broken mountainous country, lived Kurdish tribes which, indeed, were to be found intermingled with the Assyrians, even in Hakkiari. These Kurds (The Kurds, like the Persians, are Aryans though, unlike them, belong to the Sunni and not to the Shia sect. The Assyrians, like the Arabs, are of Semitic descent.) though by race and religion the opposite of the Assyrians, were in other respects not unlike them.
Besides the Assyrian mountaineers, who were Turkish subjects, other Assyrians lived in the plains to the west of Lake Urmiyah. They too suffered in the war vicissitudes of the Assyrian people, but their position, as will be related in due course, is not that of the mountaineers. Other Assyrian elements lived in the lower country south of Hakkiari, within the frontier of what is now Iraq. These people were subject to Kurdish Aghas and were not independent like their kinsmen farther north, but during the war they suffered little less, and today their fortunes are closely linked to those of the mountaineers.
The backbone of the Assyrians, the survivors of a once great people and of a once great Christian Church, were the Hakkiari mountaineers, the tribesmen of the Tiyari, the Jilu, the Tokhuma, and the Baz clans. Living as they did in a hard and unfertile land, they were very poor. What cultivation existed was mainly in artificial terraces on the slopes of the mountains. It could bring but little in, though the Assyrians were a hardworking people, far surpassing the Kurds in this respect, although, as already stated, hardly the equal of the Armenians, their co-religionists.
Their main wealth lay in their flocks and they were as much shepherds as cultivators. They led their flocks up and down the mountain pastures as the seasons changed, often living during the summer at a altitude of 8,000 feet, while in the winter their sheep lived with them in their houses, for then even in the valleys the cold was so intense that for days at a time neither animal nor human being could venture out of doors.
The villages were small and generally were built on knolls in the narrow valleys. The houses were built of stone with a flat floor. They possessed few comforts, for the Assyrians were very poor. Despite their remarkable thrift there was little opportunity of acquiring wealth. Some of them used to go down to Mosul for periods of work, in particular the Baz tribesmen, who are excellent artisans. Others even visited Europe and America, though these were mainly engaged in less creditable begging tours. The remainder, until the arrival of the Mission which the Archbishop of Canterbury sent out in 1886, were almost entirely cut off from outside influences.
Like most mountaineers, the Assyrians were quarrelsome, hot-headed - not to say truculent - and before the war they were independent by nature. It was only after their long experiences as refugees, as we shall see, their character in this last respect altered. Though educationally deficient, as can only be expected living in such a backwater, they were remarkably quick to pick up new ideas. Before the war they had little political conscience as such. Their chief idea was to live undisturbed by Government officials and by their Kurdish neighbours. In brief, they and the Kurds were living much as were the Highlanders of Scotland before the Forty-Five. They acknowledged the Mar Shimun (See Chapter VII) as their paramount chief and their ecclesiastical head. They were in fact, ruled by their tribal councils, each tribe being led by a Malik and each section by a Rais. These titles were hereditary in the case of some tribes, in the case of others these leaders were popularly elected. In theory, at any rate, the title-holder had to be approved by the Mar Shimun
Their spoken language was Syriac, directly derived from the Aramatic, the language which Christ spoke and which is still used in their church services. Their churches were small and like the houses, built of stone, containing a kind of Holy-Of-Holies, a small and dark room. Men and women worshipped together, though the two sexes stood in different parts of the church. Sermons were seldom given, and even commentaries on the Scriptures were rare.
Before the war the clothes of the Assyrians were extremely picturesque. Their outer garments, consisting of baggy trousers and a short coat, were of locally woven stuff of many bright colours. In this they resembled the Kurds, except that they wore a small conical cap instead of a turban (this conical cap, be it noted, is seen on some of the ancient Assyrian tablets). This costume is still worn by many of the villagers in the mountains, but most of them who have been in the towns have now adopted European dress.
The skin and complexion of the Assyrians resemble those of the Southern Italian and in many cases are much lighter. The men, though not tall, are generally of good physique, the weaklings having died during infancy. Fair hair and blue eyes are often seen. The women, as a rule, are darker than the men and are seldom good-looking. They possess great fortitude and remarkable powers of recovery. The life which they led before the war, and the hardships which they have undergone since, are not likely to have made them soft. The women also wielded considerable influence. Surma Khanum, the aunt of the Mar Shimun, of whom much will be written later, is certainly the most dominant personality among the Assyrians at the present time. The standard of morality among the Assyrians has always been particularly high.
Such in brief was the life and situation of the Assyrians at the outbreak of the war. (For a full description of the life of the Assyrians before the war, Canon Wigram's "The Cradle Of Mankind" and "The Assyrians and their Neighbours" should be consulted). Politically, their anxieties were pressing, but economically and socially their manner of living had altered but little during the last five centuries. The Assyrians are convinced that they are the descendants of the rightful heirs of the ancient Assyrian Empire, which with its capital at Nineveh (Nineveh is situated on the left bank of the Tigris, just opposite Mosul, and traces of its vast walls can still be seen) flourished during the second millennium B. C., until 600 B. C. and which is familiar to schoolboys, at any rate of an earlier generation, from Byron's famous verse of Sennacherib.
The Assyrians of that empire were a Semitic people who had migrated from the south of Mesopotamia after the fall of Ur about 2000 B. C. They were the founders of the first military empire in history, and their power was felt all over the Middle and Near East. They spread their conquests far afield, but the heart of their country was the Tigris Plain between Nineveh and Assur, the modern Shergat. This great empire fell in 606 B. C., when the Medes and the Persians swept westwards and blotted out all traces of the great capital, destroying it so utterly that when Xenophon and his Ten Thousand passed that way less than three hundred years later, they did not even know that they had passed one of the most famous sites of antiquity.
But though the Assyrian Empire was thus destroyed, there is no reason to think that the Assyrian people disappeared. Rulers and princes would, of course, be killed or taken into captivity, and the fighting men would be slaughtered in large numbers, but the women and the young children would survive, and even with the admixture of races that normally follows a successful invasion, the Assyrian stock must have remained very largely unchanged, in the way that the common people do remain through conquest after conquest. They were indeed to become accustomed to a series of conquests and invasions as their part of the world has been one of the great cockpits of history. The Greeks swept eastwards under Alexander, driving out the Medes and the Persians. When the Hellenic grip relaxed after Alexander's death, the Parthians and the Persians in succession surged westwards, but still the common people would have maintained their stock fairly pure and probably invigorated rather than otherwise by such admixtures as had taken place.
With the development of Roman political power in the last century B. C., continual wars were fought between the East and West, the boundary line moving backwards and forwards according to the varied fortunes of the wars; wars which in the end so exhausted both sides that they fell an easy prey to the fresh forces of Islam. The clash between the Roman and the Orient was much more fundamental than the conquests of Eastern peoples which had preceded it - the Hellenic influence brought by Alexander and his generals was too fleeting to count - for it was a clash of ideas and civilizations as well as a clash of arms, but throughout all these wars the tillers of the soil remained unchanged. They suffered, of course, and at times were even actively oppressed, but there was no persecution such as would destroy them or even alter their characteristics. In many cases the conquerors were bound to make use of their conquered enemies, who often rose to high, though not dominant, positions in the State. All this time, too, it should be remembered the country of the Two Rivers remained one of the richest lands in the world. It was indeed a garden from Samarra, fifty miles north of Baghdad, to the Persian Gulf, though the tradition that a squirrel could then journey from Samarra to the ocean without ever having to come to the ground must have been more fanciful than accurate. A remarkable irrigation system had gradually been evolved, the trace of which can even now be seen in the arid and treeless plains of Iraq. The fighting races which one after the other conquered the country were content to leave the peasantry alone. From them they took tribute, and from them they obtained their supplies of food.
And so it was following the advent of Islam. The Arabs did not, any more than their predecessors, destroy the people of the country. They granted to those who did not accept Islam a protected though inferior status, and it is clear that from the fall of Nineveh, six centuries before Christ, to the time of the coming of the Mongols and the Tartars, eighteen centuries later, the people of Northern Iraq must have changed but little. (The seventh and eighth centuries were the peak of Christian missionary activity still farther east in Central Asia and China, and the impulse came from the Church of the East of which the Patriarch had his residence in Baghdad). Students of genetics will realize the prepotent force which would have partly caused and partly been the effect of this long breeding of generations true to type. The essential elements of the ancient stock unquestionably survived. It is true that by A.D. 1400, the population was not one-tenth of what it had been four hundred years earlier. This applied with greater truth to the more southerly portion of the country, which was laid waste by Hulagu Khan, who sacked Baghdad in 1256 and put the whole population to the sword. One hundred years later, however, the arch destroyer, Timur the Lame, swept his tide of destruction across the Mosul Plain, which was the scene of one of the greatest massacres of his bloody record. With his death, in A.D. 1404, the Mongol tide receded.
By this time the majority of the Assyrian survivors had fled from the plains to the high mountains of Hakkiari, and though in due course many of them did return, it was this district which then became the real homeland of the Assyrian people. (There is no historical foundation for the Assyrian tradition that after the fall of Nineveh many of the Assyrian princes and leaders escaped to the mountains and that it is from them that the Assyrians of today are directly descended).
When the next conquerors, the Ottoman Turks, came in, they found among the survivors in the Mosul plain an extraordinary admixture of races. In few parts of the world were there more different types. The pure Arab, the pure Kurd, the Yezidi, the Jew, the Persian, the Parthian, the Mongol, as well as the ancient Assyrian type, were to be found, with admixtures of all. They exist to the present day, with the complication of numerous Christian sects. In Mosul, there are Nestorians, Jacobites, Chaldeans, Roman Catholics, with a few Protestants. To them must be added the Moslems, the great majority, a few Sabaeans, the Devil-worshipping Yezidis of obscure origin, and the still more obscure Shebeks.
It has been pointed out that the ancient Assyrian type as depicted in the tablets found at Nineveh and elsewhere is clearly retained in the modern Assyrian. Dr. Wigram in his book, "The Assyrians and Their Neighbours", gives a photographic example. This argument, however, is rather weak. The modern and the ancient Assyrians were both of Semitic blood. Many a Jew or Arab, who are also of Semitic descent, or even a Yezidi who probably is not, if he did his hair in the same way as the priest in the modern photograph would as closely resemble the Assyrian of the ancient tablets. Again, many Assyrians, and particularly those of the Tokhuma tribe, have distinct Mongolian features. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Assyrians retain something of the old Assyrian strain. It is, naturally, much diluted, but it is there. What is still more certain is that what remained of this strain has changed but little during the last five hundred years. For during this last period there has been little or no intermarriage between the Assyrians and their neighbours.
So much for the Assyrian claim that they are the lineal descendants of the ancient empire of Nineveh. It is of great ethnological interest, but is largely academic when compared with the claims they have put forward, that their Church is the survival of the ancient Eastern Church - this aspect of Assyrian history is of great importance in view of the fact that in the Middle East religion and nationality are to all intents and purposes synonymous. (A few years ago some Turks of undoubted Turkish blood were sent to Greece in the course of the inter-transfer of Turks and Greeks, simply because they were Christians). When the political power of Rome fell to pieces before the onslaughts of the Barbarians from Central Europe, and Christianity, that new religion, began to take its place as one of the great factors in the development of European civilization, the church in the East began to exert those political influences which have had their actions and repercussions down to our own time.
The spread of Christianity in the East was far more rapid than it was in the West. (According to tradition, more or less well founded, Christianity was introduced into Mesopotamia in the first century A.D. by St. Ada I [Thaddaeus of the New Testament] and his disciple St. Mara I. St. Thomas had already passed farther east into India. There was a flourishing Christian community in Babylon as early as A.D. 80, and it appears that Christianity spread even more rapidly father north, round what is now Mosul. The Partians, who were at this time rulers of the country, were probably not averse to seeing a healthy rival to the religion of their Persian enemies). Nor is this surprising. Christianity was an Eastern religion. Its first missionaries were Eastern. As everywhere else, Christianity took hold first among the humbler people. In the West, Rome was still persecuting the Christians, and as Rome was at war with Persia, it seemed politic to the Persian rulers to tolerate their Christian subjects. These wars of East against West, too, prevented much intercourse between the established Church of the East and the growing Church of the West. For though the See of Antioch was nominally under Antioch, it was even from the earlier days almost independent. Thus the fury of the dispute over the Aryan heresy hardly touched the Church of the East. On the other hand, the Church of the East accepted the doctrines of Nestorius. (Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, was condemned in A.D. 431 at the Oecunomical Council of Ephesus, the third great Council of the Church. He had quarrelled with Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. Much of the argument was obscured by terms, and indeed Nestorius himself found it difficult to describe the dual personality of Christ. But he preached that Mary was not the Mother of God, but that she was the Mother of Christ; that the Second Person of the Trinity was not born of the Virgin; that Christ died on the cross as a man, and that His Deity did not suffer thereon. The Assyrians still follow this belief, and are sometimes known as Nestorians). And in so doing, opened the first breach with the Western church.
The position changed, however, in the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine formally adopted Christianity. One of his first actions was to proclaim his protection over all Eastern Christians - protection which in fact he was not able to afford. This harmed his protégés, as have done many well-intentioned interventions of later dated. Meanwhile the theological dialectics of the church fathers were working out to their inevitable end - the breach with the church in the West, and the splitting of the church in the East (the next Council, that of Calchedon A.D. 451, resulted in a further split and the establishment of the Monophysite Churches of Syria [the Jacobites], of Egypt [the Copts], and of Armenia. It did not, however, touch the Assyrians).
But while these doctrinal disputes were important, equally important was the growing revolt of the Eastern Church against the domination of Constantinople. It was the oldest form of the conflict between the mysticism of the East, the source of all religions, and the intellectuality of the West, as represented by Greece; Semitic Thought as against Greek Philosophy. Then the Moslem hordes spread northwards, carrying out the designs of the Prophet. The Christians, who were the only educated people, were of some use to the Arab conquerors, whose habits they found were more humane than their later conquerors, the Mongols. (The religion of the Mongols when they first appeared in Mesopotamia in the thirteenth century, appears to have been a kind of primitive Paganism, or kind worship. At first the Mongols persecuted the Moslems far more severely than the more humble and harmless Christians. Indeed, for a time there existed more than a slight chance of their adopting Christianity, and there was an interchange of correspondence and missions between them and the Christian Powers of Europe. Nothing came of this, however, and finally their rulers adopted Islam during the fourteenth century. Timur was a fanatical Moslem, and his persecutions and massacres were particularly directed against the Mosul district where Christianity had survived to a much greater extent than around Baghdad. The Christian survivors fled to the mountains, where, even previous to this, there probably were some Christian elements).
History is silent about the Assyrians during the period 1400 to 1550. As already described, numbers of them gradually returned to the plains and became rayahs (protected subjects) of the new conquerors, but as quarrelsomeness and the spirit of schism are always the bane of the Oriental Christian, disputes soon arose about the succession to the Patriarchate. Since 1450 the Patriarchate had been hereditary in the same family, although it did not descend from father to son, as the Patriarch was forbidden to marry. This arrangement was admittedly uncanonical, but the Assyrians justified it by stating that it prevented bloodshed on the occasion of a vacancy and an election. In the sixteenth century one of the rival candidates to the Patriarchate appealed to the Pope against another. One hundred years of hesitations and refusals to submit completely to Rome followed, and in 1680 Pope Innocent XI appointed the third Patriarchate, Mar Yusuf, who lived at Diarbek. One hundred years later Mar Elia of the plains, the rival to Mar Shimun of the mountains, submitted to Rome. His followers came to be called Chaldean Uniates, (the Uniate Churches, of which the Chaldeans are only one of several, acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope, but retain their own language, rites and constitution) and were recognized by the Turks as a "Millet" in 1845. In the meantime, the Mar Shimun of the mountains had become a tribal chieftain as well as a religious leader. In these mountains, the Turkish writ hardly existed, and in effect both the Kurds and the Assyrians were independent, divided into clans, and possessing little cohesion. The Assyrians followed Mar Shimun in all matters religious, and on the political side it was through him that the Turkish authorities dealt with the Assyrian mountaineers whenever the necessity arose. Normally, the Assyrians held their own fairly well with their Kurdish neighbours. They were good fighters, and were respected as such. They could hit back if necessary, and not all the raiding and killing was done by one side. There is, indeed, no reason to think that the Assyrians had greater regard for the sanctity of human life and property than had the Kurds, nor that the Kurds generally had a lower standard of conduct - admittedly a rough-and -ready one - in their many raids and fights, than had the Assyrians. In 1847, however, a really bad massacre of Assyrians by Kurds took place, leading to a strong protest from Sir Stratfor Canning, the British Ambassador at Constantinople. (The Turkish Government exiled Badr Khan, the Kurdish Agha responsible for the massacres, perhaps not unwillingly, as it was already seeking to break the power of the several semi-independent Kurdish chieftains in the mountains).
After the succession of Abdul Hamid in 1878, things grew worse for the Assyrians. The new Sultan's policy was to use the Kurds to strengthen his throne, for he feared the Ottomans. His downfall in 1908 promised better things, but the hopes that were centred in the Young Turk movement soon proved vain. The Assyrians now had to compete not only with their wild Kurdish neighbours, but with corrupt officialdom. It was clear some time before the outbreak of the war that a crisis was at hand. In the meantime contact had been obtained between the Church of England and the mountain Assyrians. The very existence of this Christian remnant was hardly known in England before members of the Euphrates Expedition of 1837 wrote about them. In 1843 the Mar Shimun wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking for help. In 1847 at the time of the Badr Khan's Massacres, the life of Mar Shimun was saved by Dr. Badger, a Church of England missionary in Mosul. No definite steps, however, were taken until 1876, when a mission of inquiry was sent out by the Archbishop. This mission thoroughly investigated the position. It found besides the Patriarch Mar Shimun, one Metropolitan and eight Bishops in Turkey, and three in Persia. It was discovered that the people were abysmally ignorant and that even the Bishops could hardly read or write. They appeared to be better judges of a rifle than of a doctrine. As indeed they are to the present day. The Bishop in Jerusalem when he visited the Bishop Sirkis in the summer of 1933 was not a little shocked to find a rifle hanging on the wall of his room and a box of ammunition under his bed. Superstitions and meaningless rites abounded and spiritual life generally was at a low ebb. At the same time there was a marked devotion to the faith. Even among the "rayahs", living as serfs, there was remarkably little apostasy.
In 1886 a Mission was established by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the mountains. Similar Missions had already been established by Americans in the comparatively civilized towns of Mosul and Urmiyah. The express object of the Archbishop's Mission, as he stated in a letter to Mar Shimun, was "to strengthen and illuminate the ancient church à and not to draw anyone from the flock of your Church into new and strange folds". The methods adopted were the opening of schools for priests and deacons and the printing of church books. The results were highly satisfactory and education was at last beginning to spread among the mountaineers, when the outbreak of the Great War caused the Mission to close down.
Shortly before the war a new Mar Shimun, Benjamin, had succeeded to the Patriarchal Chair. Though young, still in his early twenties, he was a man of great courage and energy, and had the times been more favourable, would no doubt have done much for his people. His predecessor, who had held the position for many years, had been weak. Living as he did at Qudshanis, a village in the valley, he was much under the thumb of the Turkish officials at Julamerk and had little real influence over the mountain tribes. Even then he was the only possible leader of the Assyrian mountaineers. Others might raise factions, but no one but he could ever hope to influence the whole people.
The numbers of the Assyrians in the mountains just before the war appear to have been about forty thousand. Others, perhaps fifteen thousand or twenty thousand in number, lived in the plains to the west of Lake Urmiyeh in Persia. To them the Orthodox Church of Russia had sent a mission, as had the American Presbyterians. The Dominicans, too, maintained a Mission there as well as in Mosul, but in Urmiyah they do not appear to have made many converts. At this time, as will be related later, the influence of Russia in North Persia was very great. The Russian religious Mission in consequence met with some success. A further attempt was made in 1913 to convert the Hakkiari mountaineers to the orthodox faith, but the war intervened before much progress could be made.
When the Great War began the Assyrians, who were already sufficiently anxious about their future, found themselves wooed in turn by the two sides. Before Turkey joined the Central Powers in November 1914, the Governor of the Province of Van had sent for the Mar Shimun and promised him preferential treatment of the Assyrians. It was clear of course, that the Assyrians in their Hakkiari mountains occupied a key position. In the Caucasus highlands the Ottoman Empire marched with the Russian Empire, and the strength of fortified towns such as Erzerum and Erivan indicated the strategic importance of this area. Moreover, the existing Anglo-Russian agreement meant that for all practical purposes Persia was an allied base - British in the south and Russian in the north. Hakkiari, therefore, provided a spearhead for the Turks against the Russians, and here was the motive for the Turkish promises to the Mar Shimun. The Assyrians, he was told would be given arms, and schools would be opened and salaries paid to their religious and tribal leaders. These promises were renewed when Turkey entered the war. Military necessity dictated this, but by this time the Armenian Massacres had commenced. These first massacres were not on the scale of those which took place later, when at least two million Armenian men, women and children lost their lives, but they were enough to show how Christian minorities were likely to fare. According to Turkish statements the Turks at first tried to persuade the Armenians to remain quiet, but whether the Armenians gave any real provocation or not the Turks soon decided that the only way to settle the Armenian question was to exterminate the Armenians, how well they succeeded is now history.
The Assyrians, however, were not the same menace. They were far fewer in numbers and had little political contact with Russia or England. It would be a feather in the caps of the Turkish Government if it could show that, whatever was happening in Armenia, another Christian "millet" was quite content with its lot. The Assyrians at first hesitated. They had good reason. It was clear that if the Allies won the war, they were not likely to deal hardly with the Assyrians for having refused to rise against Turkey. On the other hand, if the Assyrians did rebel, and the Central Powers won the war, punishment was certain. As things turned out, the Allies were victorious, but that did not help the Assyrians.
The Assyrians had no reason to put much trust in the Turkish promises. The earlier Armenian massacres, small though they were as compared with those which took place later were a beacon of warning. The preaching of the Jehad could hardly be expected to exclude the Assyrian Christians. The Kurds, moreover, were getting more and more out of hand. Those in the South were not likely to abstain from looting, when they knew that, quite apart from the happenings in Armenia proper, Kurdish tribes had already attacked and sacked villages in Albaq district just to the north of the Hakkiari Mountains. Here a large number of Assyrians as well as Armenians were killed. The Russians, too, had commenced to make overtures to the Assyrians.
The first fighting in this part of the world was around Urmiyah. Here there was stationed a Russian consul, whose nominal bodyguard was, in fact, quite a strong garrison. For Urmiyah fell within the Russian sphere of influence. The condition of Persia was indeed an anomaly. Nominally independent, it was divided into spheres of influence, Russian and British - and the Russians, at any rate, made full use of their opportunity in the north. Persia remained theoretically neutral throughout the war, but its country was, for over four years, a battle-ground between the Turks, Russians, and in the end, the British as well. The first Turkish attacks on Urmiyah failed as the Russians sent reinforcements, but they soon were forced to retire in the face of the Turkish thrust towards Batum. This was defeated in January 1915 at the Battle of Sara Kamish and the Russians returned once more to Urmiyah, where they remained in occupation until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917. Their temporary retirement, however, had left the local Christians defenceless. Upwards of ten thousand fled with the retreating Russians and most of them are living in Russia to this day. Many of the remainder fell victims to massacres, despite the devoted efforts of the American Missions to protect them. Many of the men were killed under the most brutal circumstances and many of the young women and girls were carried off.
The Russians, on their return to Urmiyah and on their capture of Van in April 1915, made further attempts to induce the Assyrians to join them. They promised arms and other material assistance. Finally, though not without reluctance, the Mar Shimun yielded to the pressure of the tribal maliks, who, infuriated by the massacres of Assyrians at Ilbaq, ardently desired to fight the Turks. Some members of the Patriarchal family, who favoured neutrality and who were suspected of the treachery, were murdered in cold blood.
The Assyrians declared war on Turkey on May 10, 1915, and that was the beginning of their terrible Odyssey. The Turks who brought in the Kurds to help attacked them and burnt the villages in the valleys. They endeavoured to exercise personal pressure on the Mar Shimun by threatening the life of Hormuzd, his brother, who at the beginning of the war was being educated in Constantinople and was now in Mosul. The Governor of this town sent word to Mar Shimun that if the Assyrians dared to rebel Hormuzd would be executed. The Patriarch replied that he had to consider his people rather than his brother and Hormuzd was duly hanged at Mosul, as brutal a murder as any in the bloody annals of the Turks.
The Assyrians then found that the Russian help never came, for the Russian forces were, at the moment, in difficulties elsewhere. All that the Russians sent were four hundred Cossacks, who were treacherously ambushed and annihilated by Kurdish tribesmen. With the Turks in force in front of them, the Assyrians took to the high mountains, wither pursuit was difficult. At 10,000 feet and more life was out of the question in the winter, and so the Turks waited, knowing that the first snows of October would drive the Assyrians down to their doom. A heroic journey was then undertaken by the Mar Shimun himself, who to relieve the sore straits of his people made his perilous way with two companions down to Urmiyah. The Russians there told him that no help would be given and they advised him to remain in Urmiyah and so save himself. With true nobility he refused and made his way back to his people in the mountains. Even in such an apparently hopeless position the Assyrians did not despair but decided that if the Russians would not come to them they would force a way down to Urmiyah themselves. They succeeded, to the astonishment of Russians and Turks alike. Taking an unexpected route, they were able to avoid pursuit - indeed, the Kurds did not pursue with any ardour - and after great hardships the whole people, perhaps forty thousand in all, safely reached Urmiyah.
At Urmiyah they were at first secure, but their presence was a thorn in the side of the Persian authorities. These could hardly be expected to welcome the wild Christian Highlanders. Fortunately they were too frightened to do much, though one brutal and unprovoked massacre of a hundred Assyrians did take place. The Assyrians themselves, on the testimony of Dr. McDowell, an American missionary at Urmiyah, behaved rather better than might have been expected. They were guilty of some looting certainly, but little in view of what they had suffered. They were employed as irregular troops by the Russians, two battalions being organized under Russian officers and a third under the direct command of the Mar Shimun. In the course of their counter raids against the Kurds, they obtained on more than one occasion a bloody revenge for their lost villages. The Mar Shimun was sent on a visit to Tiflis, where he was received and decorated by the Grand Duke Nicholas. Other decorations were given to other leaders. On the whole from January 1916 until the spring of 1917 the Assyrians led a quiet life. The situation was, as already related, to put it mildly, anomalous. Persia was an independent and neutral country, and yet the Russians were in complete control of Urmiyah. To all intents and purposes the Persian Government did not exist there.
Early in 1917 the Russian front collapsed as a result of the Revolution. The Assyrians were once again deserted by their Allies. In one way they were, however, much better off than before. They had plenty of food, while ample ammunition and rifles had been left behind by the retreating Russians. They were, however, completely and entirely isolated. An attempt to form a front from Baghdad to the Caucasus with the help of Armenians, Kurds, and Assyrians came to nothing. The Armenians, as usual, could not agree among themselves. Simco, Agha of the Shekak Kurds, whom it was hoped to use, was a self-seeking and treacherous scoundrel. He could only be trusted as far as his personal interests were concerned. Persia, though far from belligerent, was passively hostile. The news from the Western Front became at the end of 1917 more and more unfavourable to the Allied Powers. Simco, with his sole desire of being on the winning side, soon deserted, and in February 1918 the Persian authorities plucked up courage to order the Assyrians to surrender their arms. Naturally they refused.
Fighting followed in and around Urmiyah, in which the Assyrians were successful. Soon, however, they were to suffer a crushing blow. In the long history of the East there are endless instances of hospitable invitations working out to a treacherous and tragic conclusion. Simco invited the Mar Shimun and a few of his followers to a friendly meeting to discuss the immediate present and the possible future. On all hands the Mar Shimun was warned of the risk he was running, but he disregarded all these warnings and accepted the invitation, when he and his followers were attacked without warning and massacred almost to a man by Simco's Kurds. It is perhaps, satisfactory to be able to relate that Simco, after a life given to treachery and violence, was in 1930, himself killed by the Persians under circumstances of almost equal treachery.
The Assyrians did not take the murder of their leader lying down. They attacked and captured Simco's castle at Chara and there found a letter from the Persian Governor to Tabriz, in which it was suggested that the Mar Shimun should be murdered. They also carried out by way of retaliation a minor massacre of their own against the Kurds in Urmiyah.
In the meantime the Turks had recovered their strength. They had recaptured Erzerum and its arsenal and were now unusually well equipped. Two divisions were sent down to Urmiyah to deal with the Armenians and Assyrians. The Commander, Ali Ihsan Bey, was a particularly competent soldier. The Armenians, according to their unfortunate habit, were at loggerheads among themselves, but one of their leaders, Andrianik, at any rate proved himself to be a good fighting soldier. To the Assyrians the loss of the Mar Shimun was a catastrophe. His brother and successor was young and weak in health. He died two years later of consumption in the Baqubah Camp. The Assyrians, like the Armenians, were divided. Their best fighting leader was Agha Petros, of the Baz Tribe. He had, however, a rather lurid past, and was in no way likely to unite the Assyrians, especially as the family of the Mar Shimun was opposed to him. Nevertheless, the Assyrians were able to hold their own against the Turks, whom they defeated on several occasions. They remained in control of Urmiyah, but as the months passed their ammunition was giving out. Once again their situation was critical.
Shortly before this the "Dunsterforce" had set out on its adventures towards Baku. General Dunsterville desired to protect his left flank as far as possible. The most obvious means of doing so was to obtain contact at Urmiyah with the Assyrians and Armenians, news of whose successful resistance to the Turks had, in due course, reached the British in Baghdad. The Assyrians willingly agreed to help, provided British officers were sent to lead them, as they no longer trusted even those Russian officers who had remained with them. It was decided to send a body of seventy-five British officers and N.C.O.s to Urmiyah, and Colonel McCarthy was appointed to command this mission. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the officers needed for this mission were not immediately available. A small detachment of the 14th Hussars was sent up from Hamadan and reached a place named Sain Kala, about a hundred miles south of Urmiyah. On July 8th, Captain Pennington of the Royal Air Force, after a very daring flight over the mountains, managed to land at Urmiyah. At first he was in danger from the bullets of the Assyrians, who did not know who he was, and then from their too enthusiastic reception when they realized that he was British. His arrival naturally encouraged them greatly, but he could bring tidings of little immediate help. However, in due course, a plan of campaign was sketched out. The Assyrians at this time were being attacked from two sides, the north and the southwest. It was arranged that the northern front should be held firmly, while Agha Petros should attack the Kurds in Sauj Bulak to the southwest. He should then get in touch with the British detachment of Sain Kala and thus replenish his failing supplies of ammunition. At first all went well. Agha Petros duly defeated the Turks in Sauj Bulak and drove them back to Rowanduz. Then, as nearly always happens where irregular forces are concerned, the usual muddles followed. Agha Petros had no real control over Assyrians or Armenians, and was indeed greatly mistrusted by many of them. There was deep disunion in the ranks. Instead of posting a force to contain the Turks whom he had just defeated, in case they should return, he moved on with all his forces to Sain Kala, which reached seven days after the appointed time to find that the British detachment had retired. The northern front then wavered, as the Assyrians there thought that they had been betrayed by Agha Petros. The Turks attacked them while they were wavering and the front gave.
And so began the dreadful retreat, and the Assyrians and Armenians in Urmiyah fled south and the retreat soon became a panic-stricken rout. They moved with all their families, all their livestock, and all their belongings. The searing heat of the late summer was in itself a disadvantage, and the melancholy procession had scarcely started when they were attacked from all sides by Turks, Kurds and Persians alike. As the territory through which they were making their painful way was largely Kurdish, the Kurdish attacks were the most numerous; the fact that any got through at all is proof that the Kurds, as usual, were anxious to loot rather than face bullets. There have been many dire retreats in military history, but this katabasis of the Assyrians must take its place as one of the most tragic. Their sufferings were intense, and before they made their way through to British territory they had lost one-third of their numbers. Not only were they the object of continual attacks by night and ambushes by day, but the struggling and starving mass were stricken by all manner of disease - typhus, dysentery, smallpox, cholera, and fevers. Many of those who did not succumb to disease dropped out and died by the wayside of sheer exhaustion. The line of the retreat was marked by an endless trail of dead: men, women, and children who had dropped in their tracks while on the march or were left dying when the camp was struck each tragic dawn. They had little food and little water, and Colonel McCarthy, who had by now come up, had described how whenever they camped for the night the site next morning was littered with dead and dying. Families were too dispirited to mourn those left behind, and no sooner had the camp moved off than the ghoulish tribesmen swooped down, killed off those who were not dead, and stripped the bodies of whatever might be on them. More than seventy thousand Assyrians started out on this dreadful retreat; fewer than fifty thousand reached Hamadan. Those who died in their tracks were perhaps fortunate; ten thousand were cut off by marauding tribesmen and have never been heard of again. Their men were no doubt massacred and their women and girls distributed round the countryside.
Probably little else could have been expected; the retreating mass was encumbered with families and livestock, and, much more serious, there was no leadership and no cohesion. The retreat was a rabble. Under organized leadership advance parties, rear guards, and flank guards would have been put out, and in such an orderly retreat the losses would not have been nearly so heavy nor would their morale have been so impaired. As it was, each tribe and each section fought on its own. Hard put to it as they were for supplies on their terrible journey, they would stop to pillage inoffensive villages. The stronger, too, marched on regardless of the peril of the weak who fell by the way. This hopeless rout continued until a tiny British contingent of three officers and four men of the 14th Hussars, returning to see if they be of any help, came upon a body of four hundred Kurds. Without hesitation these seven men charged and drove the Kurds off. (For this action the Commander of this fighting force received a well-deserved D.S.O.). Such was the effect of this brave action that from that time onwards the Kurds never dared to attack the Assyrians again. And so the remnants of this fighting nation straggled into Hamadan and made contact with the British troops.
Compared with the gigantic scale of the war on the Western Front, even the side-shows of Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, the part taken by the Assyrians in the Great War had been insignificant, but the suffering of the individual, whether physical or spiritual, is just as acute in a small show as in a big one. It can be said in all justice that the Assyrians had done their best in hopeless circumstances and that few would have done better. They had twice been betrayed by the Russians, but they still carried on, trusting now to the British. As a reward they have lost their former homes and more than one-third of their original numbers. When it is considered how much the Arabs have gained with infinitely less suffering and loss, it is impossible not to agree with the Assyrians to the extent of admitting they have indeed been unlucky.
The arrival of this mass of fifty thousand destitute refugees in Hamadan naturally created an awkward problem for the military authorities. It was manifestly impossible for the Assyrians to remain there. Northern Persia was already living on the borderline of starvation. It was, however, with considerable reluctance that it was decided that they should be sent down to Mesopotamia. These hungry mouths would add considerably to the already great difficulties of rationing, and there was every risk of outbreaks of disease. On the way down from Urmiyah they had already suffered greatly from dysentery and even typhus. But there was no alternative. Most of the able-bodied men were formed into four battalions, and a fifth was formed of the Armenians. These were commanded by British officers with the assistance of British N.C.O.s. In August 1918 the threat of a Turkish thrust in the direction of Teheran still existed. It was intended to use these battalions to meet it. The Assyrians were quite willing to fight though they strongly objected to being used as labour battalions. They had only two desires: to punish the Turks and to return to their former homes. As it happened, they were not employed before the Armistice was declared. Soon after this they followed the rest down to Baquba. They went sorely against their wills, as they felt they were leaving their home lands still father behind. A project indeed had been mooted that, led by their British officers, they should return to Urmiyah and thence to Hakkiari. No obstacles could have been expected except those provided by the weather. Turkey was prostrate, the Persians weak, and the Kurds unlikely to fight. Nothing came of this plan, but if it had been successfully carried out, the Powers at Versailles would have been faced with a fait accompli, which they would, no doubt, have been only too willing to accept. In August the rest of the refugees had started off again from Hamadan on the last portion of their five hundred mile trek. They were gradually shepherded down to Baquba, a town some thirty miles northeast of Baghdad. Here an enormous refugee camp was established. It was at first run on approved military lines, and the cost was high. In June 1919, nearly a year after the Armistice, Colonel F. Cunliffe Owen took charge. He succeeded in reducing the cost of the camp from about £80,000 British to £40,000 a month. Nevertheless, the total expenditure on the part of the British government for these refugees exceeded three million pounds, a mere nothing, perhaps, compared with the vast sums which had been, and were still being poured into the arid plains of Mesopotamia, but enough to justify any claim that the British might care to put forward that they had carried out a piece of really great humanitarian work.
The total number of Assyrians and Armenians who passed through the camp was 48,927. The total number of Assyrians still in the camp on October 1, 1919, was 24,579, with 14,612 Armenians. Of the Assyrians about two-thirds were from the Hakkiari mountains and Turkish subjects. Most of the remainder were Persian subjects from Urmiyah.
Naturally, when the refugees reached the camp, they were in a pitiable condition after their mental and physical sufferings. They obviously required rest. But they soon recovered under the healthy conditions of the camp. The death rate, which was at first high, sixty and more a day, became extraordinarily low. In 1919 it was reduced to three per thousand, a figure which compares most favourably with that of 14.6 per thousand in the concentration camps in South Africa from 1900 to 1902. This was all the more remarkable as the climate of Iraq, where the temperature in the summer frequently reaches 120 in the shade, was entirely different from that to which the mountaineers were accustomed. For most of their villages were situated at an altitude of 4,000 to 5,000 feet, and in the summer, they went up higher still. These results reflect great credit on the British Medical Staff. They also show how greatly preventive medicine had improved in the past twenty years.
In another way, however, the Assyrians suffered. Dr. Wigram, in his book, "The Assyrians and their Neighbours", writes: "The administration (of the camp) erred on the side of kindness. Maintenance in idleness is good for neither Eastern nor Western, and the Assyrian is a type that shows the evil results of it sooner than others". Even before the war there had been some reason to think that the Assyrians might fall ready victims to pauperization. Mr. Athelstane Riley in 1886 reported to the Archbishop of Canterbury that to proceed on a begging tour in England or America was the highest ambition of any Assyrian. He appeared to take a rather gloomy view of their character, for he wrote: "I can only say of all the Nestorians and Assyrians who have visited England during the last few years, I cannot call to mind one, whose words I would believe, where his interests are concerned, or to whom I would entrust with any confidence the smallest sum of money". It was only natural that now they should speedily acquire "a refugee mentality". Indeed, this has been ever since 1919 the greatest curse of the Assyrians. It has largely destroyed their morale and generally has done them an infinity of harm.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to make the camp in any way self-supporting, so as to provide work for the refugees. Any such project would have entailed large initial outlay, and it was never intended that the camp should be anything but temporary. Apart from this, few of the men were skilled in anything but agricultural labour. The men, as a whole, were disinclined to work at all. Parties were from time to time sent out to work compulsorily, but these proved unsatisfactory.
It was interesting to observe how rapidly the Assyrians picked up the new ideas which just after the war deluded so many people in an exhausted world. Their hopes of reviving the ancient Assyrian Empire rose high. And as the days passed their claims grew more and more expansive. Finally, they demanded a kingdom stretching from Kifri, south of Kirkuk, to Diarbeke. They appear to have forgotten that even if all the Assyrians in the world were collected together, they would only form a small minority in this area. They also forgot that the absolute essential to the formation of a nation was unity, and even at Hamadan the British officers found the divisions among the Assyrians confusing and humiliating.
The question had arisen at once as to what was to be done with them. The refugees themselves had no other desire but to return to their former homes, and that as soon as possible. The British Government earnestly desired the same thing. But many difficulties were in the way. To leave the Armenians for the moment aside, it must be pointed out that the Assyrians did not all come from the same district. As regards the Persian subjects from Urmiyah, the difficulties, though considerable were not insuperable, and in due course most of them did return to their former homes. But they could not return at once. The Persian Government was, perhaps naturally, not at all anxious to have them back. It objected that the Province of Azerbaijan was in a state of turmoil, and that their return was unsafe. A British officer, Major Eadie, visited Urmiyah and found bitter feeling existing against the Assyrians. For during their stay at Urmiyah the mountaineers had not always behaved as well as they might have. True, they had much provocation, but the Persians had forgotten the provocation and remembered only the excesses.
With the Hakkiari mountaineers the problem was still more difficult. This district remained, after the Armistice, north of the de facto frontier, which later became known as the Brussels Line, and within the borders of Turkey. The Turks refused to have the Assyrians back. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915 had placed Mosul and the surrounding country under the French sphere of influence. Until the British and French agreed to modify this arrangement, the British authorities had no real or permanent authority in the north. Nor was the local situation there at all secure. The Kurds in the mountains were not yet under control; they never really had been in the days of the Turks. Turkish propaganda was now keeping them active.
Apart from all this, the Assyrians had no leader. The murder of the Mar Shimun, Benjamin, in 1918, has already been related. He had been a man of character and courage. His successor, a younger brother, was an invalid and died at Baquba in 1920. He was succeeded by a nephew, aged eleven, who naturally could not exert any real influence. The most dominant personality was his aunt, Surma Khahum. But she had gone to England in the autumn of 1919 to plead the cause of the Assyrians, and she was absent for over a year. In any case a male leader was needed. None was available, and in consequence there was no sort of unanimity amongst the Assyrians. Even amongst the mountaineers each clan sought only to return to its own group of villages, quite regardless of the others, and equally regardless of the advantages of living in a more homogeneous state than they had possessed before the war.
Under these circumstances Agha Petros appeared to be the only possible man to lead. Mention had already been made of him as a successful fighting leader. It was, however, unlikely that even he could weld the people into one. His doubtful antecedents had made him suspect. Before the war he had been in America, making a living by selling carpets, as a confidence trickster, and in still more disreputable ways. It was even reputed that he had there killed his man. His open hostility to the house of the Mar Shimun, whose claim to temporal power he resented, further weakened his position. However, he had a definite plan. He proposed that the mountaineers and the Assyrians from the Urmiyah plain should combine to regain part of their former territory, and there form a combined Assyrian Nation. Here the refugees at Baquba could be joined by the other Assyrians who were scattered over Russia and Persia. How far the Persian Government had been consulted regarding this plan is not quite clear. It was essential that it should agree, as most of the land for this Assyrian enclave lay within the borders of Persia.
After long arguments and discussions all the Urmiyans and about two-thirds of the mountaineers accepted this plan. Agha Petros realized that under existing circumstances it would be impossible for all the mountaineers to return to their Hakkiari homes, but he hoped that it would be possible to regain the mountain country from Gawar eastwards, where they would be in close touch with the Assyrians of Urmiyah. After full consideration the British authorities agreed to this plan, and undertook to give to the Assyrians a number of rifles equivalent to those which had been in their possession when they were disarmed at Baquba. If this plan succeeded, there appeared some hope that an Assyrian Nation might be set up, but the one essential to success was unanimity, and throughout there were many signs that this was just what was lacking.
However, the attempt was made. Largely owing to the driving power of Sir Arnold Wilson, then Civil Commissioner in Mesopotamia, the first section of the Assyrians, families and all, left Baquba at the end of April 1920. A new camp was opened at Mindan, a small village some thirty miles northeast of Mosul. Further arrangements were made for an advance camp at Aqra at the foot of the mountains. Unfortunately, during the summer the Arab Rebellion broke out, and this naturally upset most of the arrangements. The railway line was cut in several places, and the British military forces were otherwise engaged. The camps at Baquba and Mindan were themselves attacked by the Arabs, but, despite inadequate rifle power, were successfully defended, the Assyrians in Mindan even pursuing and punishing their attackers. In fact, Sir Aylmer Haldane in his book, "The Insurrection In Mesopotamia", wrote: "But for this entirely fortuitous support a large proportion of Mosul division might have been swamped by a wave of anarchy".
It was now decided, largely on account of the food difficulty, that the Baquba camp should be evacuated. The Assyrians who still remained in it, were sent up to Mosul and the Armenians were dispatched to Basra to await shipment. The evacuation was completed by the end of September, a piece of work greatly to the credit of Colonel Cunliffe Owen and his assistants in view of the great difficulties which they had to face. But much time had been lost. Sir Arnold Wilson had now handed over to Sir Percy Cox, but he too approved of Agha Petros's scheme and it was decided to carry on with it.
By the middle of October it had been possible, despite a good deal of incompetence on the part of Agha Petros, to concentrate six thousand armed men at Aqra. A number of them had been employed by the British military authorities as tribal levies in the mountains northeast of Mosul, and had done good service. These had some slight idea of discipline. The remainder had little or none. The route lay over the Aqra Dagh and then into Barzan territory. Thence to Neri and so northeast to Urmiyah. Arrangements had been made with the Kurdish Aghas not to oppose the march of the Assyrians, and the slight opposition offered was easily brushed aside.
Unfortunately, on arrival in the Varzan country, divisions broke out in the ranks of the Assyrians which effectively ruined the whole plan. The mountaineers, now not far from their old Hakkiari homes, could not resist the temptation of trying to return there. It was at least possible that, unknown to the British authorities and to the Urmiyans, Agha Petros had made separate promises to the mountaineers. In any case they broke away from the Urmiyans, who, deprived of the assistance of the best fighting men, were unable to advance and eventually returned with Agha Petros to Mindan. The mountaineers, too, failed. Winter comes early in the mountains, and the climatic conditions were too much even for them. They made matters still worse by unprovoked attacks on the Kurds. They burnt the villages and killed the villagers. True, some of these Kurds had been their enemies in 1915, and had helped to drive them from their homes, but others were entirely inoffensive. The behaviour of the Assyrians merely aggravated an already difficult situation and created bitter feeling, which remains to this day. It also did the British much harm. The Kurds knew that the Assyrians had had British officers with them - actually two accompanied Agha Petros in his enterprise, though only in the capacity of observers. They could not believe that the Assyrians were not acting under British orders. This caused much hostility, and made the Kurds all the readier to listen to the intense Turkish propaganda, which was coming from over the frontier.
The failure of Agha Petros's enterprise showed that, for the time being at any rate, there was no hope of the formation of any Assyrian kingdom. The British Government was not prepared indefinitely to continue maintaining the Assyrians in idleness. Indeed, nothing would have been more harmful to the Assyrians. It was therefore decided to encourage the Assyrians to settle on the land wherever they could. They consisted, as already noted, of three main groups: (1) those from Urmiyah, who were Persian subjects. In due course most of these have been able to return to their old homes, where they are now living much as before the war. A recent visitor to Urmiyah has reported that it is difficult to distinguish them from the Persian Moslems. Their return, however, was gradual. The Persian Government, though it eventually gave way, was, as already related, by no means enthusiastic about having them back. Even now there are nearly five hundred families of them still in Iraq. Many of these are employed in the towns, in particular in Baghdad. A few have settled on the land.
(2) The second group consisted of those who before the war were living as "rayahs" under the Kurdish Aghas in Barwari Bala and Nerwa Raikan. These districts are situated south of the Brussels Line (this eventually became the permanent frontier between Turkey and Iraq. See Chapter VI) and fall within the borders of Iraq. There was no particular difficulty regarding the return of these people, who numbered about eight hundred families. The Kurdish Aghas were glad to see the return of their best cultivators. They duly returned and their lot became much better than it had been before the war, as the Iraqi Government has established a far stronger and more efficient administration than the Turks had ever achieved, and the power of the Kurdish Aghas for good or evil has been materially weakened. At first the main danger to these Assyrians consisted of attacks from Kurds from over the frontier, where there was practically no government control. A number of raids and murders did take place at first, but things have greatly improved during the last three or four years.
(3) The third and most important group consisted of the Hakkiari mountaineers, ex-Ottoman subjects, whose lands, north of the Brussels Line, lay in Turkish territory. In 1920 they were estimated to number over three thousand families ( a family is generally taken as representing five persons, men, women, and children).
The Mindan refugee camp was closed down in the summer of 1921, the Assyrians being encouraged to settle. Each man, woman, and child received Rs.120 (£9 ), the money, as usual, coming out of the pocket of the British taxpayer. A large number of the younger men joined the Levies, which force was being formed at this time as will be related later. A British official was appointed to direct the settlement of the remainder. By the autumn of 1921 it was reported that the following was the rough distribution of Assyrians in the province of Mosul:
Settled and repatriated north of Amadiyah 6,950 souls
Settled in Amadiyah district 1,100 souls
Settled in Dohuk, Akho, Aqra, and Sheikhan 7,450 souls
Of the new settlements the most satisfactory and permanent were those of the Jilu and Baz sections in the plain of the Sheikhan district.
In 1922 the whole of the Upper and Lower Tiyari, the two most important tribes, together with the Tukhuma and some of the Jilu and Baz, proceeded to their pre-war homes in Hakkiari. They appear to have met with no opposition from the Turks, whose authority in those parts at that time was almost nonexistent. For the next two years, that is until autumn of 1924, the Assyrian settlement problem appeared, on the face of it, to have ended, as with the return of the majority of the refugees to their pre-war homes there were ample lands in the Mosul and Arbil provinces for the settlement of the remainder.
In August 1924, however, an affray occurred between a party of Tukhuma tribesmen, the wildest of all the Assyrians, and the Turkish Vali of Julamerk, who was on a revenue-collecting tour. The Tukhuma captured his baggage and though they soon returned it, the Turkish Government decided to take revenge. Indeed, there is little doubt that the Turks were determined to evict the Assyrians at the first opportunity. A large military force was collected and immediate steps were taken to drive the Assyrians out of Turkey. The Turks succeeded. The Assyrians, who were incapable of serious resistance owing to the absence of most of their fighting men in Levy service in Iraq, fled back into Iraq territory, whither they were pursued by the Turkish military forces. Further incursions were, however, stopped by the Levies, backed up by Assyrian Irregulars, who had been collected by Surma Khanum, the aunt of the Mar Shimun, and by Bishop Yuwallaha. The Bishop himself, in the true Assyrian style, joined in the fray. He handed his cassock to a deacon and led a successful charge, Surma was awarded the M.B.E. for her services.
As a result of the expulsion of the Assyrians from Hakkiari, the Iraqi Government was once again faced with the problem of Assyrian settlement. Nor was the moment propitious. The rising tide of Iraqi Nationalism had by now come in contact with the alien sympathies and aspirations of the Assyrian race. The Iraqi politicians were jealous of the favours - the remissions of taxation, grants of land, and other privileges - which had been shown the Assyrian refugees, while the Assyrians were apt to regard themselves as British protégés and held aloof from Iraqi officialdom. The enlistment of Assyrians in the Levies was another factor. It is true that the Assyrian Levies were on no occasion used against the Arabs. Their employment in the guerrilla warfare against the Kurds was entirely in the interests of the Iraqi State. But the Levies were Imperial troops and as such were suspect to the ardent Iraqi Nationalist. Jealousy was almost inevitable, and this was increased by the slighting manner in which a few British officers in the Levies were wont to speak of the new Iraqi Army, which was in process of formation, and which in its first operations against the Kurds was far from successful. The situation was aggravated by the Levy outbreak at Kirkuk in May 1924 - a similar outbreak had been narrowly averted in Mosul nine months earlier. At Kirkuk the Levies, admittedly after suffering a good deal of provocation, ran amok and killed fifty of the townspeople, including a sheikh of much religious sanctity. What ever may have been the provocation, this outbreak on the part of disciplined troops was a serious blot on the good name of the Assyrians. The Iraqi Government, be it said, behaved in a very magnanimous manner, and the nine Levy soldiers found guilty at a trial, were released after having served a comparatively short term of imprisonment, and received a free pardon.
On May 31, 1924, less than a month after the Levy outbreak, the High Commissioner, in an endeavour to pour oil on the troubled water, issued the following announcement:
His Majesty's Government have given the most careful consideration for some time to the question of safeguarding the interests of the Assyrian people, keeping in view both the services which they rendered to the Allied cause during the war and their future relations with the Iraqi State. They have decided to press for a frontier as far north as possible so as to include the greater part of the Assyrian people other than those who belong to districts subject to the Persian Government. Within this frontier it is hoped to include the mountains occupied by the Tiyari, the Tukhuma, Jilu, and Baz tribes, and to provide a home within the territory of the Iraqi State, not only for those who belong to these districts, but also for scattered Assyrians, whose home is not in Persia.
His Excellency, the High Commissioner has ascertained that there are more than sufficient deserted lands, the property of the Iraqi Government, to the north of Dohuk, in Amadiva in the northern hills, upon which the latter class of persons could be permanently settled.
Having decided that this policy was the best calculated to serve the interests not only of the Assyrians but also of the Iraqi State, His Majesty's Government have invited the Iraqi Government to give assurances upon the following points, which were considered to be essential to its success:
(1) That the Iraqi Government will assign the vacant lands under reference above to the Assyrians free of cost and on favourable terms.
(2) That the Iraqi Government will grant both to those Assyrians who are thus resettled in lands to be newly assigned, and to those of the Tiyari, Tukhuma, Baz and Jilu country (if secured for Iraq from the Turkish Government) a generous measure of liberty in the management of their own purely local affairs, such as the choice of their own village headmen, and the making of adequate arrangements in each village for the collection and payment, subject to the supervision of the Iraqi Government, of such taxes as that Government may fix.
These assurances have now been given by the Iraqi Government and the settlement of the frontier is under negotiation. His Majesty's Government trust that it may be possible in the course to bring the policy which has been outlined into effect, and believe that, if it is possible to do so, it will ensure to the Assyrian people a sufficient and congenial area for settlement and freedom for the settlement of their local affairs.
The Iraqi Government had no alternative but to consider favourably the recommendations of the High Commissioner, since, without the backing of Great Britain, it was almost certain that the whole of the Vilayet of Mosul would be lost to Turkey.
The eviction of the Assyrians from Hakkiari still further complicated the situation. As a temporary measure, as many families as possible were settled in the Sheikhan, Barwari Bala, and Dohuk districts, a few families spread eastward to the Dasht-I-Harir, and round Batas in Arbil Liwa. Others scattered through the towns in Iraq.
As it was still hoped that when the northern frontier as finally delimited by the League of Nations, the Hakkiari highlands would be included in Iraq, the refugees remained in the areas allotted to them, though they were not definitely settled. These people were completely destitute, and road making schemes were organized in the Mosul area as relief measures.
In December 1925, however, the resolution adopted by the Council of the League awarded to Turkey the bulk of the territory formerly inhabited by the ex-Ottoman Assyrians, and all hopes of repatriating them were finally dispelled. It was then apparent that the Assyrians could find homes nowhere but in Iraq. Sir Henry Dobbs, who was now High Commissioner in Baghdad, had made some tentative inquiries as to the possibility of their being settled somewhere in the British Empire - Canada in particular was mentioned - but no satisfactory replies were received. Nor had the Assyrians at that time shown any enthusiasm for such a project.
During 1926 various areas in Northern Iraq were suggested as being suitable for the settlement of the refugees, among them the Surchi areas (Mosul and Arbil Liwa), Rania district (Arbil Liwa), the Shahrazor Plain (Suleimaniyah Liwa), and the Barazgird Valley in the Baradost nahya of Arbil. Nothing of the size of the area required for a homogeneous settlement was, however, available, unless the Kurdish inhabitants of those districts were to be dispossessed of property owned by them for generations and then resettled in other parts of Iraq. This would have been a manifest injustice and must have led to intense ill feeling between Assyrians and Kurds. There had been just a possibility of something of this nature being done in 1920. Sir Arnold Wilson, then Acting Civil Commissioner, had recommended that the Assyrians should be settled in the Supna Valley west of Amadiyah. He wrote as follows to the Secretary of State for India; (At this time Mesopotamian affairs were still being dealt with by the India Office. Not until after the Cairo Conference of 1921 were they transferred to the Colonial Office. On the termination of the Mandate in 1932, they reverted to the Foreign Office.) "This plan provides an opportunity of doing justice to the Assyrian community in a manner acceptable alike to themselves and to European ideas of right and justice. It will enable us to solve one of the most difficult questions of religious and racial incompatibilities in Kurdistan, to dispose of a grave menace to the future peace of Northern Mesopotamia, and to punish those responsible for the outrages at Amadiyah. This opportunity will not occur again". Sir Arnold estimated that this scheme would necessitate the eviction of some two thousand Kurdish families, but he considered that ample land was available for them in the neighbourhood, and he recommended that they should receive some monetary compensation. In his opinion and that of many other people the Kurds deserved little consideration in view of their continual revolts and their cold-blooded murders of British officers. In the light of after events it is doubtful whether even this scheme would have worked well, but whether it would or not, the opportunity had finally passed by 1926.
The most suitable and the largest area appeared to be that of the Barazgird Valley in Baradost. Here it was reported that the great majority of the former Kurdish inhabitants had perished or had left as the result of famine and military invasions during the Great War. A committee was therefore appointed to investigate. It reported that, even with a considerable amount of pioneer work, the Valley could only provide accommodation for 473 families. The Assyrians, who had been members of the Committee, were, moreover, far from enthusiastic. They stated that if they had to settle here they would only do so on the following conditions:
The Iraqi Government eventually approved of the scheme. But in the end nothing came of it. The Assyrians raised more objections. They said that the area was too far away and too isolated. The survivors of the Baradost Kurds began to put in claims to the land, while Sheikh Ahmed of Barzan, whose neighbouring territory was still not administered by the Government, gave signs that he might use his strength to upset public security.
In the meantime other efforts were made to settle the Assyrians. On March 8, 1927, the Council of Ministers passed the following resolution:
It will be noted that in this resolution no mention is made of Assyrians. The Iraqi Government throughout endeavoured to avoid such official mention. It wished to make no difference between Assyrian, Kurd, or Arab refugees. There were, indeed, some Kurds and Arabs who needed land, but their problem was essentially different to that of the Assyrians, and it was unfortunate that the Iraqi Ministers refused to face the facts. Of course they understood the problem quite well, and their only reason for not saying so officially was political. The Assyrians for their part were not easy to help. To every plan they raised every possible objection. They too, appeared to be unable to face the hard facts, or to realize that any settlement in homogeneous groups was impossible. There simply was not the land. A proof of their attitude is contained in a report dated July 28, 1927, from the British Administrative Inspector at Mosul:
The Qaimaqam (Administratively Iraq is divided into Liwas - provinces. These Liwas again are divided into Qodhas - districts and Nahyas - sub-districts. The chief administrative official of a Liwa is the Mutaserrif, of the Qodha, the Qaimaqam, and of the Nahya, the Mudir), Amadia has summoned the Assyrians concerned and made them offers, i.e. that certain Assyrian communities should be offered settlements in the way here set forth:
1,000 Upper Tiyari in Barwari Zair,
1,500 Upper Tiyari in Nahla (Aqra),
1,000 Upper Tiyari in Government villages in Doski,
4,000 Lower Tiyari in Barwari Zair,
Alamun and Garamus sections in Chamsus.
The Upper and Lower Tiyari have replied that the Government need not bother its head about settling them until next spring, when the "Assyrians will announce their decision".
The Alamun people have replied that they are already at Chamsus and could not bear to think of the Garamus people coming to the same place, and the Garamus people say that they do not intend to move from Chalki.
I think that we shall find things difficult if we persist in trying to settle the Assyrians in tribes and communities.
A little later, in September, a petition was received bearing forty-six signatures from the Chiefs of the upper and Lower Tiyari, the Tukhuma, and the Diz, in which it was stated that the Government had offered to settle them in empty villages, with very little water and bad climate, and that they have no intention of living in Iraq even if the Government offered them settlement in better villages. The truth of the matter was that the Assyrians had never really lost hope that sooner or later they would be able to return to Hakkiari.
In July 1927 Captain Fowraker, a Levy officer, who spoke Syriac fluently, was appointed to undertake the settlement work. He was to be under the direct orders of the High Commissioner. He, too, at first found that the Assyrians were difficult to help. The High Commissioner (the late Sir Henry Dobbs, G.C.M.G., who had succeeded Sir Percy Cox in 1924), appreciated these difficulties, as is shown by the following letter, written by an observer in close touch with the situation, of August 14, 1927:
As regards the proposed settlements in Ismail Beg's villages, Batas, Dasht-I-Harir, etc., the objection raised by the Assyrians that they cannot leave their present habitations "at such short notice" is not understood. Precisely the same objection was raised by them when an attempt was made to move them to these villages in the autumn of last year when they asked to be permitted to wait until the spring of this year. In April Sir Henry Dobbs visited Mosul, and in consultation with Mar Yusef and his people it was decided that August would be the best month for the move. Now it appears that the Assyrians object to moving not merely this month but this year. In these circumstances the excuse that they have been given insufficient notice is absurd.
Captain Fowraker carried on his arduous task until November 1928. He was considerably handicapped by shortage of funds, as but little (about £4000 ) remained of the Lunn Fund, which was made up of subscriptions collected in England and America in 1924.
During the remainder of the year 1927 and throughout 1928, he moved constantly among the Assyrian tribes, investigating their needs, inspecting possible settlement sites, interviewing Government officials and local land-lords, drawing up leases for the settlers, and with the funds at his disposal assisting families to move into the new and more suitable settlement areas. The difficulties were very great, but by degrees he was able to effect redistributions, with the object of grouping the settlers as far as possible according to their tribes, and also of making the best use of the available sites. The Assyrians, however, were still not satisfied and the Mar Shimun wrote to the high Commissioner a letter of complaint. To this letter the Administrative Inspector at Mosul, Major Wilson, who in November 1928 took over the settlement work from Captain Fowraker, replied with the following summary of the situation:
1. Both the Assyrian Settlement Officer (Captain Fowraker) and myself strongly disagree with the statement that there are still very many misunderstandings occurring between some of the Iraqi Government officials and the Assyrians. The experience of the Assyrians Settlement Officer and myself goes to show that in 99 percent of the cases the Iraqi officials deal with the Assyrians with tact and consideration. Very considerable portions of the newly settled Assyrians recently submitted petitions to the Mutaserrif and myself to the effect that they wished to deal directly with the Iraqi Government officials, and did not wish any interference by the Mar Shimun. Both the Qaimaqams of Dohuk and Amadia, in whose areas the majority of the Assyrians are settled, are very popular with Assyrians, and handle them impartially and well.
2. Captain Fowraker and I also entirely disagree with the Mar Shimun's contention that the majority of the Assyrians are still unsettled. Not more than 500 houses now remain to be settled. It is certain also that some of these are at present "unsettleable" as they are malcontents of various kinds who either wish to return to Turkey or are naturally wanderers. These 500 houses include about 250 houses who wish to settle in the Baradost. About Rs. 6,000 (£450 ) remain from the Lunn Fund, and it is proposed to earmark at least Rs. 5,000 of this for the Baradost settlement.
Poverty amongst the Assyrians in this Liwa is nonexistent, and man for man they are more prosperous than their Kurdish, Christian, or Yezidi neighbours. They have, however, as a nation a great fondness for money, and having acquired in addition a certain refugee mentality they look upon the British Government and charitable funds as cows to be milked to the ultimate drop.
During 1929 and 1930 settlement continued under his direction, and by the end of 1930 it was estimated that only about three hundred families still required settlement. Of these a considerable number belonged to the Ashuti section of the Lower Tiyari tribe, and were primarily shepherds. The Baradost scheme remained under consideration, but the Assyrians still rejected it, even though the Minister of Interior agreed to a force of Levies being sent up in 1931 to prepare the ground. The scheme was abandoned for the time being in the autumn of 1931, in view of the raiding into that area which had been carried out by the followers of Sheikh Ahmed of Barzan.
Such was the position when the British Mandate over Iraq came to an end in October 1932. (The locality of the Assyrian Settlements show the most southerly and westerly villages were situated on the rolling and treeless downs which gradually rise from the Tigris Valley to meet the first of the Kurdish Mountains. Others lay in the valleys of these mountains, which as one goes farther north gradually increase in height, those around Dohuk being generally about 4,000 feet, while to the north of Amadiyah they rise to 7,000 - 8,000 feet. The lowland villages, of which Simmel was the largest, were generally the most healthy, though in scenery less picturesque than those in the mountain valleys. The villages around Aqra were perhaps the most malarial). To put it briefly, the great majority of the agricultural Assyrians had been settled. It is true that by no means all of them had been settled in villages where the leases were given direct by the Government. Many of the villages belonged to Kurdish landlords. This was one of the grievances of the Assyrians. As tenants at will they were nervous as to their security of tenure. There had been, it is true, a few cases - though only very few - of Assyrians being turned out of villages in which they had been settled, but this was, perhaps, only natural in a district which had only recently come under proper administration. Though the fears of the Assyrians were genuinely held, and were such as could only be expected from people who knew very little of the country in which they were living, they were not really well founded. The ordinary Kurdish landlord wanted good tenants and as a rule the Assyrians were much better cultivators than the Kurds. In actual fact the Assyrians were living under exactly the same conditions, as the great majority of Kurds and Arabs, who throughout Iraq seldom possessed any rights in the land. Legally, the landlord had full right to evict any tenant at will, but in practice the administrative authorities stepped in and did not allow eviction of tenants except with very good reason indeed - a fact, incidentally, which was a distinct grievance with some landlords in Southern Iraq who wanted to get rid of unsatisfactory tenants. The custom obtaining all over Iraq was explained fully in June 1933 to the Assyrian Advisory Settlement Board, mention of which will be made later. The members of this Board had inquired as to security of tenure in privately owned villages. The Government Committee at Mosul replied as follows:
"Disputes between landlord and tenants shall be settled according to the method adopted throughout Iraq. The Administrative Authority agrees to the expulsion of a cultivator only when the cultivator has refused to pay the landlord's share of the crop, or has infringed the laws or has caused a breach of peace. If the cultivator does not cultivate a portion of his lands for the purpose of using it for grazing ground, he must pay its equivalent rental to the landlord".
The last paragraph was inserted to safeguard the landlord, who in Iraq receives a proportion of the actual crop, and not a fixed rent. He would obviously suffer if no crop was grown.
The leases between landlord and Assyrian tenant had been drawn up by Captain Fowraker and there were very few complaints about them. Indeed, when the period of the lease terminated, the Assyrians very often did not take the trouble to renew them, but went on cultivating on the same terms as before, without any written lease at all.
Another grievance of the Assyrians was the unhealthiness of their villages. Certainly the death rate among the children was very high indeed, as it is all over Iraq, where modern ideas as to the upbringing of children do not obtain. Some of the Assyrian villages, however, were undoubtedly extremely unhealthy; but all over the mountain valleys there is a great deal of malaria - a traveller in Kurdistan before the war remarked on the great mortality from this disease. It was, however, by no means certain that the Assyrian villages were, as a rule, more unhealthy than those of the Kurds. The conditions of both were, in any case, infinitely better than those of the Arabs in the marshes in Southern Iraq. Perhaps the Kurds and Arabs were more acclimatized than were the Assyrians, but the eagerness of the latter to grow rice did not improve matters. Rice is, admittedly, the most paying crop that can be grown in the mountains, but rice-growing is inseparable from malaria. Apart from this the Assyrians, because they refused to consider themselves permanently settled, seldom carried out any drainage works such as might do away with breeding places for mosquitoes.
The following extract from a report, written by Dr. Macleod, the British Civil Surgeon in Mosul, on September 21, 1930, is worth quoting.
I would sum up the situation as follows:
It was quite true that medical services throughout Iraq were - and still are - quite inadequate, but the national revenue is small, and much of it is devoted to such unproductive objects as the Army. In the south there were, perhaps, more medical facilities than in the north, and in the north the language question made things still more difficult, as hardly any of the doctors spoke any language but Arabic. This, however, affected the Kurds just as much as it did the Assyrians.
Some mention must be made of the assistance given to the settlers by the Iraqi Government in the shape of remissions of taxation. In October 1926 the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, expressed the view that one of the conditions of the success of any scheme of Assyrian settlement was that for a period of, say, five years from the date of settlement in any village, no revenue should be collected either from the crops or flocks of the Assyrians there. The Ministry of Finance, however, politely but firmly declined to accept this recommendation. It pointed out that a special law was required for such a measure, and that there were serious objections to the passing of such a law (what these objections were was not stated). The Ministry expressed its willingness to recommend remissions of taxation in specific cases, as put forward by the local authorities. As a result of some correspondence the Council of Ministers on March 8, 1927 passed the following resolution:
That these refugees should be informed that the Government was prepared to grant special exemption to every individual who would develop and till lands and comply with the advice and orders of the government in accordance with the law.
It must be remarked that throughout the whole period the Ministry of the Interior took a far more sympathetic view regarding the remissions of taxation than did the Ministry of Finance, but Ministries of Finance are everywhere conservative, though often politically unsound in dealing with questions of revenue remissions, while in Iraq, British advice was as a rule more readily accepted in the Ministry of Interior than it was in the Ministry of Finance.
In all, the revenue remissions amounted to Rs. 52,669 (approximately £4,000 ), not a very large sum and very small compared with the remissions of taxation which had, in the same period, been made to Arab cultivators in the south.
The agricultural Assyrians, however, were not the only problem. Since 1915, when the mountaineers were driven out of Hakkiari, a new generation had grown up, which knew little of the hard life of the tiller of the soil. Many of them now wear European dress and hats, and do not in the least resemble the farm labourer. It is a commonplace of history that once a people have left the land it is hard to get them back to it. Some, of course, did return, but not all of these were contented. They had forgotten how hard a life was that of their fathers before the war, and expected everything to be easy and perfect. Some Assyrians obtained work in the towns - men of the Baz tribe, for instance, were excellent masons and found ready employment in Baghdad, where extensive building was taking place. Others became small shopkeepers. Most of these flourished, as the Assyrians are a hard-working people, and, unlike the Arab, extremely thrifty, but others could obtain no employment. This was partly their own fault, as they had never learned Arabic - even in 1933 the proportion of Assyrians who could speak that language was very small. Nevertheless, some jobs were available in the oil companies, and a number of Assyrians were so employed, rather to the disgust of Kurds and Arabs, many of whom, too, were out of employment. Other Assyrians found work in the Iraqi Railways Administration. Few, however, could obtain Government employment, the summit of the ordinary Oriental's ambition. Here again the language difficulty was an obstacle. As the Levies were gradually disbanded, a few joined the Army. In the summer of 1932 their numbers were four officers, seven N.C.O.s., and fifty-eight other ranks. Still more joined the Police. In June 1932 they numbered 422. In fact, in Mosul Liwa, they represented 25 percent of the total Police force. Promotion, however, was difficult to obtain, especially in the Army. Examinations had to be passed, and it was, no doubt, extremely galling for an Assyrian officer with much experience in the field to fail in a written test. From 1930 onwards a few of the best educated Assyrians began to join the Iraqi Civil Service, but by 1933 there were still only fifteen employed, most of them in very junior posts.
The British Advisory officials continually recommended that the Iraqi Government should employ more Assyrians of the "Malik" (Chief) class. With a little effort posts could certainly have been found in the north, and these people could have done very useful work. It was unfortunate that red tape, suspicion, and a general dislike of Assyrians stood in the way, as nothing could have been more successful in inducing the Assyrians to accept their lot.
As it was, the majority of Assyrians still chose to consider themselves refugees. Even those settled under the most favourable conditions for instance, the Tukhuma in the group of Government villages near Basirian, a few miles from Dohuk, refused to consider themselves as permanently settled. Indeed, they were the first to depart to Syria with Yacu's ill-fated expedition of July 1933. The Permanent Mandated Commission of the League of Nations in 1932 appears to have been led to suppose that the finding of land for a comparatively few Assyrian families would finally settle the Assyrian question. Unfortunately, the problem was by no means so simple as this.
The Iraqi Government has been much criticized for its failure to effect a more satisfactory settlement of the Assyrians in Iraq. Critics have forgotten the difficulties which had to be overcome. The newly established Iraqi State was suffering from its inevitable growing-pains. The Iraqi Ministers during the years of the Mandate had many, and to them far more important problems to deal with. They naturally, and from their point of view, rightly desired an early termination of the Mandate. It was not surprising that at times they became impatient or that they found the Assyrians an irksome burden, especially as the Assyrians themselves showed few signs of settling down among or of assimilating themselves with the other peoples who go to make up modern Iraq. On the whole the Iraqis deserve considerable credit for what they achieved, and if the settlements were not perfect, this was by no means entirely their fault.
The Assyrian Levies were a most noteworthy feature of Iraq, and especially of Northern Iraq during the years of the Mandate, and no account of the Assyrians, nor indeed of Iraq itself, would be complete without some account of them.
Every visitor to Baghdad has remarked on the extremely smart appearance of the guards at the houses of the High Commissioner and the Air Officer Commanding. The general appearance of these troops, with their slouch hats and red or white hackles, was favourably commented upon by all who saw them, and their officers from time to time have said that they were as good as any troops in Asia, not excluding the Sikhs and Gurkhas.
The original Levies were not Assyrians at all. No doubt many will be surprised to learn that it was not until 1928 that the Levies became entirely Assyrian. The force subsequently known as the Levies, originated in Muntafiq Horse, a body of Arabs from the Muntafiq province on the lower Euphrates, forty in number, who were enlisted by Major Eadie in 1915. The force expanded rapidly and became known as "Shabanas", a Turkish word meaning a semi-military gendarmerie. As they became more disciplined they rendered excellent service, and during the Arab rebellion of 1920 they displayed, under conditions of the greatest trial, steadfast loyalty to their British officers. At this time practically all the "Shabanas" were Arabs, with a few Kurds in the north.
In 1919 two battalions of Assyrians were formed out of the refugees in Baquba camp. They were, however, quite distinct from the "Shabanas". They were employed in the north and did good work in operations against the Kurds near Amadiyah. They were, however, disbanded in 1920 to allow them to take part in Agha Petros's enterprise. In 1920 the Assyrians, as has already been related, had given proof of their fighting qualities, when the camps at Mindan and Baquba were attacked by the Arab rebels. During this rebellion much of the country was to all intents and purposes out of control. There were a few isolated places where British officers held out, and in several instances these officers were murdered by the rebel Arabs. It would not have been surprising, therefore, if the Assyrian protégés of the British had not been similarly dealt with. But in their camps they held out against all attacks - Arabs at Baquba and of Kurds at Mindan - and General Haldane's testimony to the value of their services has already been quoted.
In the year following the rebellion the Cairo Conference was held. This Conference was held in order to decide what Britain was to do with her Arab conquests. Mr. Winston Churchill, who was, at that time, Secretary of State for the Colonies, presided, and there were present all the experts from the old Arab Bureau who had functioned during the war in Cairo and who had been largely instrumental in bringing the Sharifian forces under the Emir Feisal. Of the many decisions taken at this Conference perhaps the most important was that the Emir Feisal, who in the previous year had been ejected from Damascus by the French, should be recommended to the people of Mesopotamia, or Iraq as it was to be called, as their King. It was also decided, that in the interests of economy the British and Indian troops in Mesopotamia should be replaced by local Levies. These were to comprise Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians and were to be Imperial troops, maintained and paid by the British Treasury. It was, however, not desired that the enlistment of Arabs in the Levies should be continued for long, as otherwise there would be competition with the Iraqi Army which was shortly to be formed.
So in April 1921 came the first attempt to enlist Assyrians, and they were far from successful. The Assyrians said that all they wanted was that the British should arrange for them to return to their own homes. Within two or three months, however, two hundred had joined, largely through the persuasive eloquence of Dr. Wigram, who, having for some years before the war served in the Hakkiari Mountains with the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission, was well known to them. The Command was given to Brigadier-General Sadleir Jackson, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O. More Assyrians joined later, and the Assyrian Levies as such had their baptism of fire in December 1921 in the operations near Batas and Harir near Rowanduz, which was at that time in the occupation of the Turks. There was not much actual fighting, but the cheerful manner in which the Assyrians underwent extremely trying climatic conditions earned the wholehearted praise of their British officers.
In 1922 it was decided to recruit 1,500 more Assyrians. The experiment of having mixed companies of Kurds and Assyrians had been tried and had failed. The Chaldeans and the Yezidis (Devil-worshippers) had proved unsuitable as soldiers. This number was duly enlisted, but the recruits suffered much from the same troubles as did our own New Army in the early days of the war, nor did they endure their troubles so patiently. At the beginning equipment, clothing, and even tents were lacking, and at Dohuk, where they were concentrated, there was much malaria, and most of them went down with fever. There were grumbles at cuts in their pay, for they had been enlisted with the promise of a monthly pay of Rs. 50, and when a 10 percent cut was made from this and they only received Rs. 45 they refused to re-engage when their first year was up. This, as will be seen, was an important factor in the future development of things. Those who refused to re-engage were later persuaded to do so by David, (he had received the O.B.E. for distinguished service during the Batas operations the year before), the father of the Mar Shimun, who later on became Chief Liaison Officer of the Levies. The importance of this is that members of the family of the Mar Shimun thus came to exercise very great authority over the Levies. For a considerable period they controlled enlistments and promotions, and at the present time those Assyrian Levies who remain in the service are the most enthusiastic supporters of the Mar Shimun. Conversely, the influence of the Mar Shimun's family among the Levies has greatly strengthened his own authority among the Assyrians as a whole. It was very convenient for the British authorities when any question arose to deal with the Levies through the Mar Shimun. This was notably the case when the political mutiny of 1932 occurred and, as will be seen later, it had much to do with the Mar Shimun's claim that what he called his temporal power should be recognized.
By October 1922 the Assyrian units in the Levies consisted of two battalions of infantry, one pack battery, and two squadrons of cavalry. During the year they had been employed in operations at Rania, near Suleimaniyah, and at Amadiyah. In Amadiyah town there was a sudden Kurdish rising, inspired partly by Turkish propaganda and partly by a dislike on the part of the Kurdish Aghas of being brought under control, which had nearly resulted in the capture of the Qaimaqam. He was only saved by the prompt arrival of Bishop Sirkis, who, as soon as he heard what was happening, hastily collected two hundred Assyrians and sailed into the fray - another proof that an Assyrian Bishop is as much at home with the rifle as with the pastoral staff. (Another Bishop, Yusef, uncle of the Mar Shimun, was once invited to take part in a sweep at a R.A.F. rifle meeting. He did so and finished seventh out of 150 firers!). Two unfortunate incidents were soon to occur. In August 1923 there was a fracas in the Bazaar at Mosul which nearly caused a serious outbreak. Two Assyrian children were found killed and their murderers were never discovered. The Assyrian Levies, whose headquarters were in Mosul, in their indignation nearly got out of hand. The people at Mosul are always difficult, and there had always been feeling between the Moslems and the Christians in the town. This feeling became more bitter as the result of this incident, and it was most unfortunately followed in May 1924 by a serious affair at Kirkuk, where the 2nd Battalion of Assyrians was stationed and where there was an actual outbreak. As in Mosul, relations between the Assyrians and the townspeople of Kirkuk, mainly of Turkoman origin, were the reverse of friendly. A second battalion was under orders to proceed to Suleimaniyah to join the Iraqi Army in operations against Sheikh Mahmud, the Kurdish National leader, who was engaged in one of his periodic revolts against the Iraqi Government. It was alleged that the townspeople taunted the Levy soldiers with what would happen to their wives and families when they left for the front. Tension ran high and a brawl in a coffee shop caused a riot. The news was carried back to the barracks that an Assyrian soldier had been killed, and this news set the match to the powder barrel. The Assyrians seized their rifles and ran amok throughout the Bazaars of the town, firing on everyone they saw. To start with, their own British officers were unable to check them and for some little time they were out of control, and it was only with some difficulty that their officers were able to reassert their authority. Fifty of the townspeople were killed in this affair, among them a much revered religious Sheikh. Four Assyrian soldiers lost their lives. No doubt the provocation was considerable, but, as has been stated in an earlier chapter, whatever the provocation may have been, such an outbreak on the part of disciplined troops was a serious blot on the good name of the Assyrians. Most serious was the effect it had in widening the gulf between the Assyrians and the Iraqis, who by 1933 seemed to be fully persuaded that the Assyrians were invincible - a psychological factor which will be appreciated in a later chapter. When a court-martial at Kirkuk was held only nine Levy soldiers were found guilty. This, too, caused considerable comment in the Iraqi Press, unaccustomed as it was to the justice of a British court-martial. They were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, but the Iraqi Government displayed a very creditable sense of moderation and only a portion of the sentences was actually served.
In the summer of 1924 the Assyrian Levies were again engaged in operations against Sheikh Mahmud. (Actually the Assyrian Levies were engaged in almost continuous operations against Sheikh Mahmud from the summer of 1924 until May 1927. It has always been somewhat of a grievance among them that few of them were awarded the General Service Medal, which the R.A.F. personnel obtained for shorter periods of service). At that time the Iraqi Army was only three years old. Unlike the Assyrians, who had the benefit of the direct command of British officers with experience in dealing with such troops, the Iraqi Army was under the disadvantage of being officered by Arabs, with British officers only in advisory capacities, and these Arabs were either ex-Turkish officers who, however experienced, had found no little difficulty in turning over to British ideas, or young officers whose military schooling was just beginning. The Arab troops too were untried; most of them were plainsmen or men from the deserts and towns. They were entirely out of their element when taken up into Kurdish hills, where conditions of warfare are much the same as on the northwest frontier of India. The terrain is entirely in favour of the defenders. Sheikh Mahmud's men were not only well armed, but they knew every inch of the country. The Iraqi forces were moving through a semi-hostile countryside, and there is no doubt that the Arab troops would have found themselves in serious difficulties if they had not had Levy support. This was true as late as 1932, when the rebellious Sheikh Ahmed of Barzan could never have been reduced by the Iraqis without the help of the British Royal Air Force. The Assyrians, too, sent their 3rd battalion later in 1924 to the Amadiyah district. As already related, the Turks had evicted the Assyrian settlers from the Hakkiari mountains and had pursued them into Iraqi territory. Here they were repulsed, largely by the Assyrian irregulars who had been hastily collected. The regular Assyrian troops on this occasion displayed the finest discipline under the most trying circumstances. Their families were imperilled from the advancing Turks, but the Levies remained firm. They behaved just as well, as will be described later, under even more trying conditions in August 1933.
Another attempt to employ Assyrian irregulars the next year ended in failure, as the following account shows. The costumes of the men recruited at Mosul indicated how irregular they were. Some of them were dressed in their picturesque native Assyrian clothes, and thence by various stages to European dress complete with grey bowler hat. They were only raised at all by an increase of a promise of pay. They had no idea of discipline on the march or in action. During the action at Kinaru, on June 25th, every man fought for himself bravely enough, but with entire disregard for the rest of the force. When placed on picket near Penjvin, most of them left the picket line and descended to the village to loot. Only on independent patrols did they do really good work, and here they nearly obeyed orders. On this the Colonel Commandant of the force interviewed them and sixty-nine of them agreed to obey orders. These were formed into a mounted body called locally "The 69th Light Horse" . The rest were sent back to Mosul and discharged. It was at this time that the Assyrians suffered their heaviest casualties in action, but these casualties were very slight and must appear trivial as compared with the holocausts reported almost daily during the Great War. And in fact the Assyrians were never tested in the face of heavy losses. This is a point which has sometimes been lost sight of. The Assyrians were at home in the mountains, and they were the equals of the Kurds in the guerrilla warfare on their own grounds. Under these conditions they were infinitely superior to the Arabs of the plains, but it was never put to the test whether their fighting value outside their own terrain (when after the mutiny of 1932 a few of the Assyrian Levies were moved down to Basrah, they were distinctly unhappy in the steamy autumn on the Shatt-al-Arab) would have been greater than that of the Arabs had these two been commanded, by British officers. In the type of warfare, however, in which the Assyrians were engaged and to which they were accustomed, heavy casualties were not likely to occur and they certainly did all that was asked of them. They were enthusiastically praised by their British officers, who, as is the way with British officers all over the world, fostered as much as possible their esprit de corps. Perhaps, however, there was too much belittlement of the young Iraqi Army, which was in the process of formation, and which, as already stated, in its first operations in the mountains was by no means successful. This comment will probably be criticized in certain quarters, but it can hardly be disputed that some of the junior British officers in the Levies were rather prejudiced against the Arab Government. In any case feelings of intense jealously sprang up between the Assyrian Levies and the Iraqi Army, and these feelings increased the mutual dislike of Assyrian and Arab. The Assyrians took their cue from their officers - indeed, from the very fact of their service with the British - in despising the Arabs. The Arabs felt that a subject race was being used as an instrument against them by the Mandatory Power, whose intentions they never imagined were honest. Neither Assyrian nor Arab in those early days of the Mandate thought for one minute that within ten years British control would be gone and the country independent, and the Assyrians' unpopularity from 1932 onwards is largely the result of their service with the British. The services for the British commended them to the whole of the British community, to their own officers, and to the members of the Royal Air Force stationed from time to time in the country. Their appearance, as has been said, was smart and they were, moreover, cheerful under the worst weather conditions, and, as is the way of mountaineers, they could endure extreme hardship. Unlike many native troops they could, and did, produce officers who were fit to command. Those Assyrians who rose to commissioned rank were all men of initiative and efficiency. They had taken readily to British tactical ideas, and, unlike many Eastern peoples, they were not only willing but able to accept responsibilities.
From 1926 onwards the Levies began to be reduced in strength. Those that took their discharge were given a rifle and two hundred rounds of ammunition, the object being that they should be able to protect themselves in their villages. The Arabs have strenuously criticized this on the grounds that it was a British device to establish a pro-British armed enclave in the north of Iraq. When the troubles came in 1932-3 the Arabs still believed that the British were using the Assyrians against the interests of the independent Arab Government in Baghdad, and were both surprised and relieved when they made the discovery that it was British policy to support the Iraqi Government and not the Assyrians. So far as concerned the rifle and two hundred rounds of ammunition, the issue of these was fully justified. Practically every Kurd in the country is armed, and it was only right that every Assyrian should have a rifle as well. It would have been impossible to have sent the Assyrians home to their villages unarmed, for that would have put them at the mercy of the Kurds. Equally impossible was the only alternative, namely the disarmament of the Kurds - even yet the Iraqi Government is not nearly strong enough to effect this.
Some of the discharged Levies joined the Iraqi Police, where they did well, and a few the Army, where not through any fault of their own, they proved less satisfactory. Altogether approximately four thousand Assyrians passed through the Levies. The greatest number serving at any time was about two thousand five hundred. By June 1932 their numbers had been reduced to one thousand five hundred, and a year later to eight hundred, and they were employed solely to guard the British R.A.F. aerodromes as provided in the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1931. There had been no active service since 1927, though they had assisted the Iraqi Army in garrisoning various stations, notably Billeh, just at the foot of the Barzan country. Negotiations are now in progress with a view to changing the name of the Levies to that of Air Defence Guards, for which force Arabs and Kurds are